where orders emerge

The Least Attractive Jobs

The latest EconTalk is a monologue by me on the following question: does our standard of living require people at the bottom to do the lousy jobs that we don’t want to do? This question was posed to me by a news correspondent for a national network. He assumed it was true. That is, he assumed that to keep people comfortable at the top of the income distribution requires an underclass. Implicit in this argument is the idea that our standard of living is a zero-sum game. In the podcast I discuss why this isn’t true–why our standard of living isn’t a zero-sum game and how the jobs at the bottom of the economy have evolved over time.